Using DVD drive causes infinte series of reboots

Attempting to read from or write to the DVD drive causes my desktop computer to reboot into an infinite series of reboots until the disk is removed from the drive. The reboot occurs randomly in time, sometimes immediately, sometimes anywhere during the read, once when the read was complete and an installation was in progress, sometimes during the write in a disk copy. The drive itself is not the cause as I have the same problem after installing a new drive. I am running Windows 7 pro 64 bit svc pack 1. In an attempt to troubleshoot the problem I rebooted with automatic reboot disabled, but the system still rebooted without the bsod when the problem occurred.

Any thoughts on the cause of the problem or how to troubleshoot it? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If reinstalling the DVD drivers does not work, or if the DVD is not found this could be an upper/lower filters issue. This MS article may help. If everything fails this could be a case of the DVD drive itself failing. These are relatively low cost items that do fail.

Note that the problem is NOT that Windows does not recognize the DVD drive. It is that the drive while operating, either reading or writing, causes Windows to reboot into an infinite series of reboots until the disk is removed from the drive. Even turning off the automatic reboot on error in the F8 menu does not result in the bsod instead of a reboot. Also note that the problem persisted when I replaced the DVD drive with a new one.

Somewhere about a dozen disks. No error messages. Turning off the automatic reboot on error in the F8 menu was an attempt to get the system to crash with the bsod or som other error message -- didn't work.

Hi Bob,
Type cmd in the start menu 'Search programs and files' box. Right click cmd.exe and select Run as administrator. Once the Command Prompt is open, type the following command and then press Enter. sfc /verifyonly (Note: There's a space between sfc and /verifyonly.) Reboot your pc when done.
This is not the usual method of doing it, but it will show any errors it finds.